Akram Khan Dance Company, Outwitting the Devil, review: a beautiful show that’s liable to outwit the audience

Akram Khan is one of the most inquiring, intelligent, exhilarating dancer-choreographers this country has ever produced, which is not to say that he has always been the “easiest” – certain elements in past masterpieces of his such as Desh (2011), Until the Lions (2016) and Xenos (2018) remained tantalisingly mysterious even at curtain-down. And yet, these works all cleverly gave you just enough, in terms of theme, visuals and narrative, to get a proper handle on them, and it was then up to you to engage, emotionally and intellectually – an infinitely rewarding experience.

More recently, with Khan increasingly leaving the dancing to others, both his and regular dramaturg Ruth Little’s reluctance to spoon feed audiences has felt more intense, and it has started to lead them and their audiences up blind alleys.

Premiered at Sadler’s Wells in September, Creature was a well-intentioned but hopeless muddle. And, although Outwitting the Devil – premiered in Stuttgart two years ago, and this week getting its British premiere – is considerably better than that, it is still exasperatingly dense and opaque. In the absence of any clear dramatic exposition (or explanatory programme notes, though those, ideally, would be barely necessary anyway), you may well find yourself flailing for much or all of it.

I can tell you (because it says so on the Sadler’s website) that it is based on the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh – which, dating from around 2100 BC, is regarded as the earliest surviving work of literature. The young king of the title destroys a legendary cedar forest and kills its guardian, whereupon the gods take the life of the wild man, Enkidu, whom he had tamed and befriended. Eventually, Gilgamesh “passes into history, to become a fragment among the broken remnants of human culture and memory”.

It is very “Khan” to have rooted a modern piece – about mankind’s ritualising of memory and, I suspect, the perilous state of the planet – in an age-old myth, and the 80-minute result certainly looks as timeless as it does beautiful. Told in flashback, with the occasional voiceover (in French, for some reason) translated into English via surtitles, it plays out a kind of painfully exquisite penumbra, with Khan’s choreography, embracing Western-contemporary dance and at least one Indian classical discipline, mostly slow, coiled, tense.

Images and passages of violence, death, religious ritual and divine intervention abound, and at certain points, the names of animals are recited – also in (untranslated) French – over the speakers. However, where each mention of those creatures is accompanied by distinct imitative mime, as though they know their exact place in the cosmos, “homme” is often repeated, without mime, and as if with an invisible question-mark after it.

Outwitting the Devil is, then, nothing if not existentially ambitious, and it is also danced with near-preternatural control and urgency by the six-strong ensemble. But there is a wilful grandiosity about the way it guards its secrets, a whiff of prension about all those animaux fran?ais. Khan completists and Sadler’s regulars should certainly give it a look, but the house on Wednesday was far from full, and I fear Khan's largely impenetrable forest of ideas will recruit few newcomers to the contemporary-dance cause.

Until November 27. Tickets: 020 7863 8000; sadlerswells.com